La Quinta High girls volleyball players Daisy Doan, from left, Jessie Nguyen and Camryn Hohneker are seniors and multi-year letter winners. The Aztecs finished second to Garden Grove in league this season, and last won a league title in 2010.

Orange County doesn’t make many girls volleyball programs like this anymore.

What La Quinta High coach David Tran is attempting to build off McFadden Avenue is a program sustained by four-year letter winners who know and understand the game, a volleyball haven of sorts where girls arrive as novices and graduate as experts.

It’s a tall task.

La Quinta isn’t flush with club players, nor will it ever be. Frankie Perales has built a fine program at nearby Garden Grove High, and Santiago High is on the up and up under Melissa Arroyo. Segerstrom High and its fantastic volleyball program is six miles east. Fountain Valley High is a line drive down Brookhurst.

There are myriad reasons for La Quinta not to be great.

But Tran needn’t longtime players nor a gymnasium brimming with league and CIF championship banners to establish legitimacy.

“We’ve improved every year since I’ve been here,” said Tran, in his seventh season as La Quinta’s head coach. “We get girls as freshmen who may not be the best athletes, but they work (hard), and they become who we want them to become by their senior year.”

Jesse Nguyen is one of those girls. So too is Camryn Hohneker and Daisy Doan.

Tran gets players who excel at other sports and gives them something to do in the fall.

More often than not, they continue coming back.

“Volleyball’s easy to enjoy,” said Doan, a basketball transplant.

These particular Aztecs are the labor of the past four years, and in October, they were in position to capture the program’s first Garden Grove League championship since 2010.

Then, they ran into Garden Grove last week.

***

Tran is a Bolsa Grande High alum who went out for the school’s volleyball team only because playing year-round baseball from age 9 to 15 took the fun right out of it.

New to the sport, he was coached up by a friend, and made a habit of going to open gyms with others at night.

Tran said he was “thrown to the fire” as an apprentice, but he never stopped learning.

“There were two levels at the gym I’d go to: advanced and intermediate,” he began. “I’d play intermediate; that’s where you were taught the game, the basics. But when I was off (the court), I’d always watch the advanced guys to see how to play the game at their level.”

Tran set for Bolsa Grande’s junior varsity team as a junior, then lettered as a senior.

After graduating in 1999, he assisted his former team during the summer. Tran later became a lower-level assistant, coaching frosh/soph and junior varsity at his alma mater for three years.

In 2005, Tran took a similar job coaching girls at Garden Grove. When in 2008 the opportunity to assist La Quinta’s varsity team arose, he pounced. A year later, he was named the school’s head girls coach.

Tran’s inaugural team won four of 10 league matches and missed the playoffs. The following year, La Quinta captured the Garden Grove League championship with a 10-0 record and later won a playoff match.

“Year in and year out we start slow, but by the end of the season, we’ve improved,” Tran said. “Our girls have more confidence, skill, technique at the end of the year. They know how to keep poised, how important their character is on and off the court.

“It’s always satisfying to see these girls grow as players and as people.”

***

Tran has eight years experience coaching club, and the value of having a high school coach who rubs elbows with upperclassmen bound for Division I stardom is not lost on La Quinta’s letter winners.

“(Tran) has so much knowledge,” Doan said. “We’re taking advantage of having a coach like him, who coaches girls that’ll play in college. We’re obtaining his knowledge without the price (of joining a club program). We don’t have the same backgrounds as girls who play club, but he’s giving us the opportunity to compete on the same level.”

Tran, currently coaching at Brea Volleyball Academy, broke down the biggest differences between club and high school players:

“Club is quicker, there’s less explaining,” he said. “Here we dissect everything piece by piece. These girls are learning timing, footwork, arm positioning. How fast do my arms need to be out? Where does the ball have to hit my arms? It’s very detailed. But when they get it down, you can see the light bulb click.

Because of its personnel, La Quinta plays more methodically than most.

Points in Division 4AA are not won quickly. Outside hitters don’t fly toward the net in the Garden Grove League as they do elsewhere. For La Quinta to succeed, it must master the minutia.

“There’s a lot of back and forth at this level,” Tran said. “We’re not high-flying. But we’re very aware of the things we’re doing, the fundamentals. We have to be smart and change things up, like the way we attack. We can’t become one-dimensional.”

Said Nguyen: “I love our teamwork, our cooperation, our effort as a team. To play volleyball, you have to become best friends with your teammates.”

***

La Quinta beat Garden Grove in four sets on Oct. 13. Two days later, it lost in five to Santiago.

Tran said beating Garden Grove was a landmark victory. The Argonauts went 10-0 in league last season and advanced to the Division 4AA semifinals. Many letter winners from that 2014 team graduated in the spring, Tran said, but Garden Grove’s luster – perhaps its greatest strength, he suggested – remained.

Hohneker called the win “exhilarating,” saying: “As a team, that’s something we’ve been wanting to do since we started: Beat Grove. And to actually do it, we got over a big hump. We knew they were our biggest competition this year, and to get that win was a weight lifted off our shoulders.”

La Quinta played Santiago the night its football team played its homecoming game.

Many of La Quinta’s letter winners are involved in extracurricular activities, and Tran said they ran themselves ragged preparing for the football game, the dance, etc. Tran saw a tired team on Oct. 15, and its play suffered.

In early-October, La Quinta, Garden Grove and Santiago were in a three-way tie for first place in league. Garden Grove then beat Santiago and La Quinta in consecutive weeks to pull away from the pack.

La Quinta has qualified for the playoffs, but it must wait another year to pursue its second league championship under Tran.

In the meantime, the coach will continue cultivating his next great team.

“I want these girls to be the best they can be, regardless of the level of competition,” he said. “My goal has always been to get these girls playing the right way, to have fun, but also to learn to appreciate the game. They’re getting the same training as everybody else, and they aren’t as inferior as they’re supposed to be, having started later than everyone else.

“These girls are playing up to their full potential. There are no dull moments.”

Brian Whitehead covers San Bernardino for The Sun. Bred in Grand Terrace, he graduated from Riverside Notre Dame High and Cal State Fullerton. For seven years, he covered high school and college sports for The Orange County Register. Before landing at The Sun, he was the city beat reporter for Buena Park, Fullerton and La Palma.

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